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Connie May Fowler

CONNIE MAY FOWLER is an award-winning novelist, memoirist, screenwriter, and teacher. Her most recent book, A Million Fragile Bones, is a memoir that details her experience during the Gulf oil spill and explores the close ties between place, spirituality, family, and environmental devastation. It will be published in April 20, 2017 by Twisted Road Publications. Her most recent novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, was published by Grand Central Publishing to wide acclaim. Connie is the author of six other books: five critically praised novels and one memoir. Her novels include Sugar Cage, River of Hidden Dreams, The Problem with Murmur Lee, Remembering Blue—recipient of the Chautauqua South Literary Award—and Before Women had Wings—recipient of the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Buck Award from the League of American Pen Women. Three of her novels have been Dublin International Literary Award nominees. Connie adapted Before Women had Wings for Oprah Winfrey. The result was an Emmy-winning film starring Ms. Winfrey and Ellen Barkin. In 2002, she published When Katie Wakes, a memoir that explores her descent and escape from an abusive relationship. Her work has been translated into 18 languages and is published worldwide. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, London Times, International Herald Tribune, Japan Times, The Sun Magazine, Oxford American, BestLife, and elsewhere. For two years, she wrote “Savoring Florida,” a culinary and culture column for FORUM, a publication of the Florida Humanities Council. In 2007, Connie performed in New York City at The Player’s Club with actresses Kathleen Chalfont, Penny Fuller, and others in an adaptation based on The Other Woman, an anthology that contains her essay “The Uterine Blues.” In 2003, Connie performed in The Vagina Monologues alongside Jane Fonda and Rosie Perez in a production that raised over $100,000 for charity. Domestic violence shelters and family violence organizations have honored her with numerous awards. Throughout the 1990s she directed the Connie May Fowler Women with Wings Foundation, an organization that was dedicated to aiding women and children in need. In 2009, she received the first annual Peace, Love, and Understanding Award from WMNF Community Radio. She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts low residency creative writing MFA program and directs the College's VCFA Novel Retreat held each May in Montpelier, Vermont. Connie is founder and director of the Yucatan Writing Conference. For ten years, she directed various writing conferences in Florida, including the prestigious St. Augustine Writers Conference, which she recently closed in order to concentrate her efforts in the Yucatan. She lives on Isla Cozumel with her husband Bill Hinson.

Works

2017

A MILLION FRAGILE BONES

On April 20th, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a BP operated oil rig, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven men died in the explosion. Before the well was capped, it spewed an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the gulf. The spill directly impacted 68,000 miles of ocean, and oil washed ashore along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and Florida.
Connie May Fowler began that day as she had begun most days for the previous sixteen years, immersed in the natural world that was her home on Alligator Point on Florida’s gulf coast, surrounded by dunes and water birds, watching dolphins swim in the distance. Then began the nightmare from which she would not emerge for more than a year.
In her memoir, A Million Fragile Bones, she details the beauty and peace she found on Alligator Point after years of heartbreak and loss, and the devastation and upheaval that followed the oil spill. It is, at its heart, a love song to the natural world and a cry of anger and grief at its ruin for the sake of corporate profits. " A Million Fragile Bones stands as testament to the devastation caused by the greed and irresponsibility that lead to environmental disasters, to all creatures, human and otherwise."--Tampa Bay Times